Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been gaining popularity over a number of years due to the growth and advancement of unmanned technologies, as a variety of industries worldwide continue to adopt and adapt unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) for a variety of tasks. The role of UAVs continues to expand, as new technologies continue to enhance the capabilities of unmanned vehicle, system, and payload electronics. The focus of UAV development and implementation the world over, especially in times of economic pressure, is on operational efficiency and safety.
Advanced UAV sensor payloads are acquiring a wealth of data, including full-motion video (FMV) and high-definition (HD) images. Bandwidth is often limited, however, and can prevent the transmission, sharing, and implementation of mission-critical information. Such network limitations are driving the need for efficient data processing directly on the UAV. As such, operational efficiency and safety needs have focused UAV development on the ability to do as much autonomous onboard processing as possible and to reduce the volume of data exchanged between the UAV and ground stations.
With the ever-increasing demand for efficiency and flexibility, many engineering intensive applications opt to use multi-composed systems to conduct cooperative tasks. Such applications are widely spread across industry sectors, e.g., the multi-robot systems in automotive industry, the multi-actuated platforms in manufacturing, and formation flying of multiple flight vehicles or spacecraft (satellites) in aerospace, etc. The cooperative behavior for these multiple dynamic systems provides flexibility and maneuverability that cannot be achieved by an individual system. One key element to the success of such coordination is the motion synchronization among these involved components or systems. Motion synchronization addresses the cooperative or coordinated schemes of multi-composed systems when they work in an integrated fashion and are required to show the same kind of dynamic behavior. It requires high accuracy regulation of motion states such as the position, velocity and orientation. Therefore, the challenge lies in providing synchronized control strategy and real-time communications among the multi-composed systems.
With respect to flying vehicles, U.S. Pat. No. 6,271,768 to Frazier, Jr. et al. describes a system for avoiding traffic collisions, involving the cooperation of a follower aircraft in conjunction with lead aircraft. Data between the aircrafts are shared to coordinate flight. Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 6,718,236 issued to Hammer et al. teaches a method of trajectory planning and prediction among vehicles in their coordinated maneuver. The approach involves receiving and using the state data of numerous vehicles to coordinate them within a common maneuver. In this aspect, the approach is focused on predicting the trajectory states of the vehicles to conduct the coordinated maneuvers. However, current state of the art has disadvantages in maintaining maneuvers, especially under disturbance or otherwise dynamically changing conditions of a flight path for a UAV group formation.
In addition, existing methods have not addressed the scalability of the system to allow for large formation flight or motion synchronization of multiple UAVs.